Introducing: City of the Rails

City of the Rails

iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture, History, Places & Travel

4.8 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 January 2023

⏱️ 3 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When journalist Danelle Morton’s daughter skips town to hop trains, Morton follows her into the train yard, and across America. In City of the Rails, the listener shadows Morton as she travels the country trying to understand what drew her daughter to this life. Her guides are the rail cops, train engineers, and hobos she meets along the way, each of them with their own extraordinary tales of the beauty and brutality of the rails.

City of the Rails’ mother/daughter story unfolds across a landscape of vast open spaces and filthy backstreets as Morton shows us how railroads shaped the modern world - from creating our time zones and QR codes, to the first lobbyists and unions. The story of the rails is the story of America, and through 10 episodes, Morton reckons with our history, and her family history, as she tries what she can to bring her daughter home.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Have you ever thought,
0:02.0	ever thought, get me out of here.
0:05.0	You take a look at your situation and think,
0:11.0	there's got to be something better than this garbage.
0:14.0	Was this when my daughter Ruby was thinking when she skipped town to hop trains?
0:19.0	It's just absurd that we live in a country with so much wealth and privilege and young people
0:23.2	choose to live in poverty and explore the country that way. It's fascinating.
0:28.8	But the rails are dangerous and unforgiving.
0:33.0	If you want to play with the devil, you're going to find them.
0:36.0	They're in the well yards.
0:38.0	That's where they catch their prey.
0:39.0	Like I have to go or I'm just up on this train.
0:41.0	God knows where I'm going to end up and I jump.
0:44.0	What drew Ruby to this life, where everything was at risk?
0:48.0	You force yourself to be stuck on this massive freight train going through the elements.
0:53.0	And people would always be like, why are you doing this?
0:56.0	And I'm like, so I don't have to do what you do.
0:58.0	I thought my daughter was rejecting me and the life I held out for her,
1:02.0	but Ruby wasn't running away.
1:04.4	She was running towards something.
1:06.4	Hello?
1:07.4	That's what I found when I followed her into the city of the rail.
	...

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